Sewing & Crafts Calculators

This category currently holds one calculator: the quilt backing calculator, which figures out how many yards of fabric a quilt backing needs once overhang, fabric width, and piecing are accounted for. Rather than pad this hub with tools that don't exist yet, the guide below expands on the yardage math itself, since backing fabric is the single most common yardage question quilters run into and the one most likely to end in either an expensive overbuy or a frustrating shortfall.

A quilt backing is never cut to the exact dimensions of the finished top. Batting and backing shift slightly during quilting as the layers get handled, stitched, and in many cases stretched across a longarm frame, so a backing cut flush to the top's edges risks coming up short somewhere along the way. The standard fix is overhang: extra fabric added to every side, usually 4 inches, before quilting even starts.

That margin also accounts for shrinkage. Most 100% cotton loses 3 to 5% of its size on a first wash, and even fabric that's never prewashed still loses a little width and length once it's squared up after quilting is finished. Skipping the overhang to save fabric is the single most common reason a backing ends up too small once the quilt comes off the frame, forcing a second trip to the fabric store mid-project.

Quilting cotton is manufactured and sold at 42 to 44 inches wide, but that number on the bolt isn't what actually ends up in a finished project. The selvages, the tightly woven edges carrying the manufacturer's color dots and printing information, have to be trimmed away, and squaring up the raw edges before cutting takes a little more. Once both are accounted for, 40 inches is the realistic usable width for planning any yardage calculation.

That 40-inch figure is why anything wider than a crib or small lap quilt needs piecing to make a full backing. Wide or extra-wide backing fabric, woven up to 108 inches, removes that constraint for most throw, lap, and queen-size quilts, at the cost of a smaller range of prints and colors and a higher price per yard. Which option costs less depends on the quilt's size: wide backing needs less total yardage, but pieced standard cotton often costs less per yard.

Fabric is cut off the bolt in quarter-yard increments at most shops, and no shop cuts a fraction of that, so any yardage calculation landing between quarter-yard marks has to round up rather than down. Rounding down by even an eighth of a yard can leave a pieced backing physically short at the fabric store, delaying a project until a reorder arrives. Buying a little over the calculated minimum, rather than exactly to the decimal, is standard practice for this reason.